A Friendly Game of Golf

Submerged in the second paragraph of a small article on the front page of yesterday's News was the following item: "Harvard will play Princeton in a dual golf match on the Ray Tompkins Memorial Links tomorrow morning". The statement does not sound startling in itself, but it does show the utter futility of two great universities trying to keep at arms length from each other for an appreciable length of time. Harvard and Princeton have officially severed football relations for an indefinite period. Concerning the much-discussed break there is apparently much to be said on both sides. The irony of the situation is palpable enough, however, when we consider such instances as this.

Since John Harvard and the Tiger picked up their moleskins and refused to play several years ago, athletic representatives of the two universities have met in various sports. Today's golf match is not the first instance. The relations at those times have been reported as always cordial and friendly. Coupled with this is the fact that Harvard and Princeton men will appear to speak to each other. Well then one might ask what's the matter? Frankly we do not know.

A barrage of reasons has been advanced for the recent rupture. There is neither rhyme nor reason in airing these here. It all seems to revert to a conjecture as to the mental age of those who allowed a foolish publicity stunt on the part of a group of half-baked humorists precipitate what may have been some subconscious foreboding on the part of either university into a heated altercation rather than an intelligent discussion.

The breaking of athletic relations between major universities is slowly coming to be a fetish. They become more macabre when viewed in the light of the apparently minor incidents on which they are invariably based. Beneath all this past exchange of blows, Harvard plays Princeton on the Yale golf course today. A natural corollary might be a meeting of Harvard and Princeton undergraduates on Yale soil to bury the hatchet. The suggestion is not new. It was proferred by the Yale Student Council at the time of the break. It might still succeed on one condition: that it be an undergraduate meeting. Let the alumni stay home and cut paper dolls. Yale Daily News